Out Listen the Competition: How Customer-Centric Innovation Drives SuccessOut Listen the Competition: How Customer-Centric Innovation Drives Success

Out Listen the Competition: How Customer-Centric Innovation Drives Success Transcript:

Jeff White: Welcome to the Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how are you doing, sir? 

Carman Pirie: I’m doing well. How are you doing? 

Jeff White: I’m doing great. Thanks. Signs of spring all over. 

Carman Pirie: Oh, yes. I’m excited for today’s conversation. I think it’s like these stories where people recognize their competitive situation and know they need to take a different approach in order to drive success. They can’t drive from the same playbook that everybody’s singing from or the same song sheet, not the playbook that people would be singing from. But yeah, so excited for today’s conversation. 

Jeff White: Yeah, I think it should be interesting. So joining us today is Dani Mason, Dani is the VP of Sales and Marketing and Customer Solutions at B9 Creations. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Dani.

Dani Mason: Thank you. Glad to be here. 

Carman Pirie: Dani, it’s awesome to have you on the show. First off, tell us about  B9Creations. Can you maybe introduce our listeners to the firm, and then we’re going to learn a whole lot about you as well?

Dani Mason: Absolutely. So B9 Creations is a high-precision 3D printing manufacturer and solutions provider. And that’s in industries ranging from aerospace and defence to bioprinting, medical devices, research, and even jewelry manufacturing. It’s grown from a startup on Kickstarter 12 years ago to now a global manufacturer serving customers in about 70 countries worldwide. We have a custom and commercial arm, and we have since retained all manufacturing, still right here in the US. 

Jeff White: That’s awesome. And you don’t often get to hear these where are they now stories about what happened with the Kickstarter you threw a hundred bucks into, 12 years ago.

Carman Pirie: Exactly. Yeah. Did you throw a hundred bucks into it? 

Jeff White: No, not into this one. Many have failed, but I have put a hundred dollars into hoping for something at the other end. So it’s good to see some success stories. 

Carman Pirie: And Dani, how did you end up there? Tell us a bit about you and your background.

Dani Mason: So I spent my early career doing marketing and PR in education, and I like to call myself the translator in chief in that role where you’re taking these complex scientific ideas and you’re distilling them down to a compelling narrative for a variety of stakeholders. And that really piqued my interest in technology and innovation and being on the cutting edge of industries. And so from there, I actually co-founded a consultancy with my husband, where I was doing a lot of the same marketing and PR for a variety of corporate and government accounts. I got connected with the CEO of B9 Creations during that time and became their first full-time marketing hire. They were located, at this point, in the incubator, on the campus where I had been doing marketing and communications for the Science and Technology University. So it seemed like a really perfect fit to be able to make the leap over into the private industry. 

Carman Pirie: And you made the leap over into an incredibly competitive one. The space of 3D printing, we’re a far cry beyond people printing out things in their garage here. You know, this industry is accelerated so much, advanced so much, a lot of it’s… 

Jeff White: Already seen a ton of consolidation, even. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Yeah. 

Jeff White: In a short period of time. 

Carman Pirie: So Dani, you picked a tough spot. 

Dani Mason: Yeah, let me tell you, it’s been a wild ride. 3D printing started in the 80s, but so much of it was tied up IP-wise that really didn’t expire until the 2010s. And then you see this explosion to your point, there’s going to be a 3D printer in every home and you get this hype curve. And now fast forward to 2025, and companies that are in the sub 2500 range, 90 percent market share, four companies. For companies that are in the upper end of this range, you mentioned consolidation. There has been a ton of that. And editorially, my belief, a lot of people mistook investor funds for product market fit. And what that does is you eventually run out of runway. And we’re seeing a lot of that today, where I had a lot of promise, a lot of companies bought in, the technology didn’t deliver. And so you’re combating, yes, it’s new and exciting and innovative and I have major trust issues. And that’s really been the genesis. You talk about competitive advantage. I don’t have a huge budget a huge R&D team and untapped unlimited resources and that’s really why we put the customer at the center of everything we do we say our advantage is out listening not outspending out-R&Ding out marketing But out listening and that’s been the key to our success is they can trust the part and the partner 

Jeff White: I love that.

Carman Pirie: I want to peel that back a little bit I want to understand what this strategy means to out listen because I guess instinctively you know, I guess if you’re sitting in front of the customer for an additional five minutes longer than anyone else is, then theoretically you’re out listening to them, but I get a sense that there’s much more to it than that.

Dani Mason: Yes. I would say it’s involved in everything from the structure of what I call the demand creation part of our organization. So sales, marketing, customer experience, solutions, engineering, all of that sits together under one umbrella. And they all have customer interactions through the way we develop products. So I mentioned we have a custom and a commercial arm. We do what I like to call customer-funded R&D. So I’m not going to go make something on the hope someone will have a problem and that I can be able to meet that need. I’m only going to fall in love with problems and those I’m only going to find outside my own building.

And so we do a lot of custom projects where people are coming and saying, I have this problem. B9 solve it. We do, and then we’ll take elements of that. And translate that over to our commercial line and then again, go through another customer validation process where they’re intimately involved. And what does the product look like? What is the pricing and offer like? How should we distribute this to the market? Is this meeting enough pain points? They direct every market that I’ve entered since I’ve been at B9 over the past eight years. They actually were the genesis of us starting a whole services business. And so it’s super embedded in everything we produce. And then if you look at the front end of the business, they’re also part of my sales team. We call our customers brand ambassadors. And when you have a small sales team, you need to be able to get the word out. And so they do referrals, they’ll give leads to us. They actually do a ton of user-generated content. So how they’re unboxing products for the first time, what does that experience look like? How did this transform your business? They do a lot of results videos. And so they’re just embedded in every single part of the company, so that no one from technology to sales, to marketing, to quality, to manufacturing feels divorced from that input. And it can really direct everything we do. 

Jeff White: I think that’s fantastic. And I really love the idea of sales and marketing and customer service and solutions and engineering and everybody being part of that same team. With all those different people involved and customers, how do you formalize this? Like, how do you capture it understand what it’s doing and plan for what comes next? 

Dani Mason: That’s a great question. We do that in a few different ways. So we have what I would consider a core customer council. That is people that are representative of the industries we’re trying to serve. And by the way, people that aren’t currently our customers, to make sure that we’re not getting too siloed into who we’re talking to today, and then we have very structured voice of the customer outreaches, and that’s not just me calling on people with a set of questions, whatever business trajectory that we’re trying to discern where we think the future of the company should go, but I actually do peer to peer matching. So a solutions engineer is talking to a technical counterpart in these companies. Just as our marketing person is talking to a marketing counterpart in these manufacturing companies to make sure that we’re getting a diversity of perspectives, not only in the industries but in the people inside these organizations. I’m sure you can relate and your listeners can relate. That B2B marketing is not single. You have decisions by committee and there are multiple levels of buy-in. And so you need to be aware of what the organizations look like internally, just as much as the single focal point that’s going to be entering into your company for a sale. So those are some very structured ways.

We also have a very structured beta program. So if we have a product with that small customer council that then moves to a trial with a set of alpha users, beta users, before releasing to the market, we try to put enough structure around that feedback that it’s meaningful and that you don’t lose the insights in the noise.

Carman Pirie: This is I don’t know if the listeners are feeling this or not at this point, but if you feel like you’re, like, starting to have to, struggling to write down all of the good advice that Dani’s giving us, then you’re in the same boat that I am. I don’t know, this is fascinating. Dani, I wonder where I was going with you, you started to answer the question in some ways without me asking it, but I didn’t get to specific numbers. Let me try to get an understanding here because what I was going to ask is whether we have brand ambassadors or even core customer councils. I was curious about how you help ensure that those brand ambassadors are true reflections of other customers, I have found in some other instances where I’ve seen brand ambassadors being used. They are often the exceptions that prove the rule in the market. They’re the people who are incredibly active on socials or they have a passion, a following here or there, or they’ve succeeded in a certain area that made them visible to the brand and therefore they become a brand ambassador, but they don’t always reflect. If you will air quote normal customers, but it sounds as though, you’re going through from the core customer council through the alpha and beta phases. So I guess if I were trying to answer my own question, I’d say that it sounds like there’s, I don’t know, 20, 30, 40 plus customers that end up inputting in on this over the course of that kind of trajectory of development. So I guess, is that how you ensure that it is truly representative, or am I putting too many words in your mouth? 

Dani Mason: No, it’s a great question and a really salient point. I think a lot of times when you think about brand ambassadors, people immediately go to how much of a social media following we have. And that is not the premise that I start with. The first thing I start with is how representative are you of the customers I have traditionally served, the customers I currently serve, and the customers I want to serve. And then I take that, for your point about the 20 to 30 people, absolutely, but they need to fill each of those buckets. And then there has to be values alignment. When you’re going to differentiate in this business, and it’s not going to be purely on price or distribution, but it’s going to be, I provide a different experience, I really want to make sure that the values alignment is there because that will determine how they go present our brand to the market. Far more than I have a hundred thousand, a million social media followers. And you’re one of 10 brands I may be doing this with. So I make sure that they are effective in each stage of the customer I’m trying to serve, in their knowledge about 3D printing, about our brand, and then do they take the same approach to partnership, not vendor customer. And that’s really been key to making sure that I’m not drinking my own Kool-Aid, so to speak, with a bunch of customers that are representative of who I’d like most of them to be but aren’t in reality. I also get a lot of feedback. I would say Social media should be called social listening if marketers are doing it right. And that’s where you get this breadth of feedback that’s not always positive. I’m in forums and customer support portals that have nothing to do with our technology, but they’re industry-specific. And so I want to make sure that I’m keeping a pulse on people that have radically different views than those I have put in this customer council or these alpha and beta programs as well. So that’s a little bit how I ensure. I can look at myself in the mirror and see an accurate reflection staring back. 

Jeff White: I wonder, you mentioned this idea of including customers that you want to serve in these groups, so wouldn’t we all love to have those people involved in our content creation and our product creation and all of that? How do you get people who haven’t bought the B9 Kool-Aid yet, or maybe aren’t even, how are you finding them and how are you enticing them to join you on that journey? 

Dani Mason: Yeah. So I’m actually in the middle of this right now, cause we’re doing a voice of the customer exercise, and none of them are our customers, and this is going to sound really low-tech. But I think it’s critical because in the role I have, marketing, and sales, it blurs. And I do both. And I would encourage any marketer that wants to be good at their role to not see sales as a separate division. So I’m going out on LinkedIn and I’m saying, okay, what are the types of customers? They’re usually the head of additive manufacturing. Or VP of engineering, what are the titles in the industries and the companies I want to serve? And I’m pitching them directly. Hey, I’m doing this voice of the customer project and it’s going to inform the next generation of our company. Here’s why I reached out to you specifically. Here’s what I think your company can offer. Can I have 30 minutes of your time? And you would be amazed at the amount of people that say yes because they are valuable. They do have expertise to offer, and very few people. We’ll go out and do the work of getting them. And so we’re, I’m doing that. My team is doing that. And we’re setting up these interviews and recording them and then leveraging all the good tools, AI, et cetera, to be able to pull these insights. But a lot of times when you meet with a customer and you understand their needs. If I feel like we have a solution that can solve it, I’m not afraid to tell them, Hey, this was my primary reason, but you mentioned these things were pain points. Would it make sense to set up another call to talk about it? And so you end up helping bridge from, I don’t know who you are. Yes. I’ll offer my insights. Oh, I do have that problem. You’ve solved that for someone else. Sign me up for another call. And I think that it can feel scary to people who didn’t grow up in the sales world to go do that. But it is incredibly effective to be able to have direct interaction with those customers that you don’t serve today.

Carman Pirie: One of the, we’ve enjoyed picking on SaaS over the years here at The Kula Ring and an evaluation of SaaS just from an investment potential, et cetera. And I don’t know if I can speak for every marketer out there, but. I certainly, I’m offered every week, you’re offered, will you speak to us about a marketing automation platform or your views on this or that, and then they’ll, they’re offering you 200 or 500 or an Amazon gift card or I don’t know some sort of silliness like that. I didn’t notice an incentive as part of your comment there. So am I reading that correctly? 

Dani Mason: You are correct. There is no dollar incentive. I think that preparation is key. You have to know who you’re talking to. The most valuable resource anyone has, it’s time. And so I’m not going to disrespect you, by not spending the time to prepare. Why do I think this person is the right person? Why do I think this company is the right person? How can this be mutually valuable and beneficial? I share with these folks. I’m going to share everything I learned right back at you. And you know what? I wouldn’t underestimate the power of a little FOMO. I’ve talked to your peers in these three industries already. Here’s what they said. Would you like to be part of this as well? And they want to be among their peer group. And so it’s, I’m going to use the word. Lazy marketing, and then probably never get invited back to this podcast again. But I think if the only thing you feel like you have to offer is a hundred-dollar Amazon gift card, then you’re actually not trying to get customer feedback. You’re trying to check a box, and I’m not, pooh-poohing, want to make sure that it’s valuable but go find out what they care about. Because most people I talk to, it’s not 200 of Amazon. I want to connect with other people in my space. Tell me more about what you’re doing. Help me solve my problem. Far more valuable than being able to buy a couple of lunches on someone else’s dime. 

Carman Pirie: I couldn’t agree more and I think that it’s, I don’t know if it’s unique to the world of manufacturing necessarily but it certainly over indexes in this world versus others. I think where you have people solving very niche and complex problems, and they’re really interested in talking to other smart people who are similarly interested in helping them work on those problems. In fact, I think offering the incentive can cheapen the outreach to the point where it decreases its effectiveness. 

Dani Mason: I completely agree. If my whole premise is out listening, that better be tied to a relationship, not a transaction. And if I start transactional, how am I ever going to get to a point where there’s a relationship? And so that’s really my intent. And I wouldn’t underestimate the authenticity that comes through when that is your intent and that is how you’re communicating. 

Carman Pirie: That, I think we could do a whole episode on that last comment. Yeah, Jeff, I’m gonna have to I’m gonna go away and start sketching out that other episode. You can ask some additional questions if you like.

Jeff White: I really think that I want to learn more about the kinds of content that your customers are creating and how you’re using it at B9 and leveraging that to, get that word out and prove the value of these customer councils. 

Dani Mason: So some of it is again, I, this, you can call it necessity is the mother of invention. And so I don’t have a huge production budget. These aren’t slick videos. I mentioned that all of the customer-facing teams are under one roof. When we go onsite for training or a customer visit. Someone’s whipping out a phone and they’re recording a two-minute video. What problems did this solve? Where do you want this to go? What are you working on next? Why’d you pick us as a partner? It’s very simple questions. And that’s a key way of getting an ongoing funnel of different results that you can post on social media, our website, frankly, our sales team uses that as sales enablement content, and it’s how we then derive what product should we do next all the way up through more formalized webinars and in-person panels and events, where we will invite customers to come and speak about their expertise. B9 is a facilitator in that role. We are not the headline. We’re not saying you all come and talk about how great we are for an hour, please. Thank you. No, we’re saying you can talk about it. What was so challenging about picking the right additive technology when you did pick it? How did you get stakeholder buy-in and executive buy-in? What does it look like to successfully implement this? And again, you’re just innately curious about how they are successful with your product.

Or any product that’s like that, and people will come and they’ll want to share that expertise. So we’re doing a lot of that digitally, I would say, but also a fair amount in person to, if I’m going to go visit a customer, I’m going to put an event around that and invite a bunch of prospective people to go visit them in their facility and see how they’re using the technology.

And the follow-up question I always get is no one will let me use their logo, because when you’re talking to Medtronics and the Johnson and Johnson’s and these customers that we have, there’s a whole legal team that is there to prevent that and what I say to people is, I’m not after, can I just plaster your logo everywhere I’m after what project did we work on? And did it provide value? And normally, if you have a good relationship with a company, they’ll tell you what they can and can’t do. I can’t endorse your product, but I can do a video on this project that we did additively and talk about why I did it with you. I can do a panel, especially if there are other industry partners on it. And so a lot of times. What’s more, where can you meet us on this journey? And it frees up a lot of us to not have to go through legal, get killed and go back to that cycle of hoping someone, will say that they loved B9 Creations. 

Jeff White: Are you doing anything to track them, trying to think of the right word that would capture this, but almost like the third-party business That’s happening as a result of what you’re facilitating, like the connections that you’re making between these different manufacturers who may have some of the same problems. I am assuming they end up also doing work with each other and not just you. Are you tracking that at all? 

Dani Mason: Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say, I’m going to answer it in two parts. For sure, we can see the business that’s generated off this customer content that comes back to B9 Creations. Not just from customers, but competitors, and distributors. 

We also have facilitated and formalized a lot of what you’re talking about with business with each other. I’m going to give you a couple of examples. In 3D printing, you have the printer itself, you have materials, and you have software that runs it. A lot of times people won’t want to use the materials we make because they need something special. So we had a partnership, for example, with a company called Coal Plant that makes biomaterials, think 3D printing organs, and we worked with them on our printer making their material for them to go produce their parts. What came out of that is they said, gee B9, does anyone else have this problem? Yes. Yes, they do. And now we have an offer where it’s their material in our printer. And we’re actually doing our first pilot project together with a third-party customer that leverages that. I could give a number of examples like that, where they may go off and do their own business with other customers, but there’s so much fruit in these kind of joint venture initiatives that come out of this intimate relationship.

Carman Pirie: This is the part where we end up jumping around a little bit, and I go back to something you said earlier, just because I think, we gave some interesting guidance on the notion of just simple questions. Get their quick answers to simple questions and that can drive an awful lot of content.

And then just a little bit after that, you’re talking about how you can also help avoid some of the pitfalls with the legal department as a result. And my goodness, that all sounded a whole lot more fun than the case study turmoil that a lot of manufacturing marketing teams go through where they’ll sweat over whether or not they are speaking technically enough in the case study and whether are they at the level of the engineer and are they over the head of the prospect as a result, and all of these considerations, and then they finally get something that they think they might be able to get, that they might be able to be proud of, and then they can’t get it by legal for a lot of their money. And it just seemed like a better approach, to what you’re doing there, Dani. I’m curious, does it mostly come to life in short-form video content? Can you just, have you found, a sweet spot therefrom, even a format? A grittiness of detail or depth or yeah. 

Dani Mason: Yeah. So I understand B2B is business to business, but really it’s people to people. And so when you’re sweating over technical details, I feel that you lose the forest for the trees in terms of what problem did we solve? Because if I’m going to go speak and resonate across industries or to other customers, the problem is going to resonate. Not all the technical details in the implementation. And that’s the thrust behind these quick questions. And, yes, a lot of it is short video. Think 30 seconds, a minute. And then you can repurpose it into themes. Some of them are going to be on the technology. Others are going to be on the customer experience. Yeah, others are going to be on, what was it like in implementation and support? And so that takes the lion’s share, but we then translate that. That becomes Future webinars, it becomes long-form white papers that may take a theme that we’re seeing and blow it up. Whether that’s a product or a particular problem a customer has. Quality assurance is an example of one that has come up. It’s now its whole own webinar, white paper, and product offering. And the genesis of that was, I have heard this in the last 20 short-term videos. We should go ask people if this is something that they’re struggling with. So I would try to start where there’s enough there that you can explode it across platforms because you have the central idea of what you’re trying to communicate, and then it becomes a distribution activity. And honestly, with AI and my team, you can be so fast and effective without needing three months of production to be able to get all this content out. My, just like I ship products, that’s how we ship marketing content. Get it out there, get feedback, iterate, and that’s really been my approach. 

Carman Pirie: I think any regular listener of the podcast will know that I, towards the end of the show, like to be a bit contrary often, and I wonder Dani, it’s, all this sounds wonderful, listen to customers and they’re going to help guide our not just the products we make, but their, how we market them, et cetera. Has a customer ever led you astray? Have you ever gotten an insight that just seemed so overwhelmingly amazing from a customer, and then you started down this path, and it just wasn’t? 

Dani Mason: Yeah, let me give you an example of that. In the early days of our company, operating a 3D printer took a lot of user know-how. Yeah, calibrate things and twist knobs and make it so it worked perfectly. We said, and this, by the way, this printer was sub 5, 000. We said I think that we should at least double the price, have no calibrations, and make this thing super easy to use. Customers will love it. They don’t have to fiddle around with it. When you think about who our user base was at that time, they are tinkerers. Give me all the knobs. I want to build it myself. Don’t divorce me from the technology. That’s why I bought this, to begin with, and so why I’m so intentional about making sure there are people that I don’t serve today, that are giving the input, is exactly what you’re talking about. And it wasn’t that they were trying to lead us astray. That was why they bought it. You think about crossing the chasm. Of course, that’s what they loved about us. So how do I maintain my brand essence openness? Okay. Accessibility, willingness to solve your problem and not having it so tightly tied to what this product looks like that I cannot evolve as my market does. And so that was an example where, you go tell a customer, Hey, I’m going to raise your price by double. I’m going to make your life easier, even though you don’t want that, but you’re going to love it. And it’s a little bit like the phone with no buttons, right? Or if I ask people what they’d want, they’d say a faster horse. When you think about Henry Ford, and that’s not a slam at your customer base. That’s where we all live. And so there’s a lot of times where you don’t leave your intuition at the door when you’re talking with customers, but here. Hear the need they have, not the request they’re communicating. And that’s just good advice, whether you’re in marketing, sales or married. And if you can figure that out, you’re just so much better able to respond to the real needs. So that’s my encouragement there. And yes, that problem does arise. 

Carman Pirie: That’s amazing advice, and I think it will help people stay in marketing, stay in sales, or maybe stay married.

Jeff White: And nobody ever gets divorced because of out listening. That’s not necessarily true, but we’ll leave it…

Carman Pirie: Jeff’s thinking, actually, I know somebody. 

Jeff White: Recently. 

Carman Pirie: Oh my goodness. Dani, I’ve just really enjoyed this conversation. Wonderful to have you on the show. It’s been a learning a second, frankly. And I know I speak on behalf of our listeners when I say thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us. It’s been a joy. 

Dani Mason: Oh the joy has been all mine. I appreciate you both for having me on. 

Jeff White: Thanks so much.